The Humiliation Myth

Humiliation doesn’t explain terrorism; the spread of Political Islam does. A response to Peter Bergen and Michael Lind.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

As Peter Bergen and Michael Lind ably demonstrate in their recent
article [“A Matter of Pride,” Issue #3], the notion that poverty causes
terrorism–and that, absent poverty, terrorism would diminish
radically–is a fallacy. Indeed, the “myth of deprivation” is so
manifestly inadequate that it is worth asking whether its supporters
actually believe it or whether, instead of confronting the complexities
of terrorism’s causes and the difficulty of combating it, they prefer
to mouth a platitudinous perspective that poverty causes all ills and
that alleviating poverty (which will not happen soon) cures them.
Bergen and Lind are also certainly correct that a sense of humiliation
fuels terrorism. After all, the terrorist movements they discuss, as
well as others, so often speak its wounded idiom and the associated,
though analytically distinct, idioms of vengeance and justice for
perceived wrongs.

Yet whatever the substantial virtues of Bergen and Lind’s analysis,
they seek to replace one misguided and reductionist master explanation
with another. The threat we face is not merely a humiliated Muslim
populace that can be assuaged by putting an end to the putative
humiliation. Rather, we are in a struggle with a powerful, highly
aggressive, and dangerous political movement, Political Islam. This is distinct from the religion
of Islam and its many non-Political Islamic adherents. Because of this,
focusing on the “humiliation” that we are said to cause Muslims
obscures the central issues regarding the real nature and magnitude of
the current threat.

The problems with the humiliation perspective of Bergen and Lind
partly mirror those of the poverty position. The authors take
humiliation mainly as a given and thus fail to investigate why
terrorists and their supporters feel so humiliated in the first place,
especially while other peoples and groups subject to similar or greater
indignities do not. For instance, while they note that many non–Middle
Eastern countries have not given birth to terrorist movements, they
fail to note that many of those countries have also suffered
substantial exploitation, domination, and all manner of indignities by
Western powers, which often exceeds anything experienced by Middle
Eastern countries. But, even assuming that Bergen and Lind are correct,
they still fail to explain what exactly humiliation is–because, far
from being an objective characteristic, as they seem to propose, it is
a subjective quality that manifests itself in different quantities and
intensities in different places, even in response to similar stimuli.
And unless we delve deeper to understand what makes some people more
prone to humiliation, we avoid the central issue and set ourselves up
for misguided policy decisions.

Nor do Bergen and Lind explain why humiliation in and of itself
leads to such disproportional will to violence and slaughter. For
example, they claim that humiliation is the master explanation for the
rise of Adolf Hitler and the politics he, with the willing aid of so
many Germans, pursued. Its historical absurdity aside, this argument
actually highlights the reductionism and untenability of their claim.
There is simply no way to explain how the “humiliation” of a lost war
(World War I) and a perceived unjust peace (Versailles) led Germans to
attempt the annihilation of an entire people (the Jews) who had nothing
to do with either; exterminate the mentally ill of Germany and
elsewhere; conquer the Eurasian continent; slaughter additional
millions of so-called subhumans (Poles, Russians, and others); turn
entire peoples into slave populations; create a vast concentration camp
system with more than 10,000 installations; and seek to destroy
Christianity–and that’s only a partial list of the Nazi regime’s
assault on humanity and Western civilization. Such an apocalyptic and
cataclysmic politics can come only from a mix of many other ideological
and other factors, including eliminationist anti-Semitism, a profound
racism that held the world to be composed of warring races in a
struggle for dominance and survival, and a strategic vision and the
opportunity to finally fulfill certain long-standing imperial
aspirations. Much the same can be said of today’s Political Islamic
terrorists who seek to destroy the West; of Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, who seeks a world “without the United States and without
Zionism”; and of Hamas, whose leader, Khaled Meshal, would desire to
“sit on the throne of the world.” In each case, a grandiose,
uncompromising, and apocalyptic vision of Islam is the motivating
force. Humiliation has played, at most, a tertiary part in producing
such hopes and plans.

This points to a third problem with Bergen and Lind’s singular
emphasis on humiliation: It ignores the other critical factors that
govern terrorist aspirations, especially the political-religious
ideologies that shape their political goals and through which they
understand the actions of Western powers. This is not to say that
Bergen and Lind make no mention of ideology. They do several times, and
they do see it as a critical factor. But they treat it only in passing,
and wrong-headedly. In their analysis, ideologies are principally an
outgrowth of humiliation and not the framework that governs people’s
understanding of their own situation in the world. Such a cursory
theory of ideology cannot explain why, for example, Arabs–and now with
the Islamification of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, so many Muslims
worldwide–conceptualize the very existence of Israel as an intense
humiliation. Such a phenomenon can only be explained by plumbing the
worldviews of those who feel humiliated by a political fact that has,
objectively speaking, nothing to do with the vast majority of them.

Bergen and Lind also categorize the relevant ideologies as “radical”
and “revolutionary,” spread by “madmen and isolated sects” and
“revolutionary extremists”; in doing so, the authors render them as
extreme, unusual, artificial, or perhaps artifactual of something else
(namely humiliation). But the ideologies at issue are not in fact
obscure ideas but rather foundational political-religious worldviews,
grounded not in the minds of “madmen” but in extremely widespread
(though by no means universal) interpretations of Islam. They precede
and then evolve in conjunction with political developments and acts,
including (but hardly restricted to) those acts that are interpreted as
humiliating.

A fourth flaw in their analysis is that it treats terrorism as a
foundational problem and policy issue, when in fact it is but one very
serious manifestation of the most basic problem: Political Islamic
movements that threaten to extend the sway of a totalitarian
understanding of Islam and politics, and that use a variety of
political and violent means, including terrorism, to achieve their
ends. To be sure, there is nothing analytically wrong with focusing on
terrorism as a problem. But no treatment of the contemporary terrorism
that emanates from Islamic countries and groups can be deemed adequate
without an account of its relationship to the Political Islamic
movements and countries–and to their understandings of Islam–that
provide its followers and general sustenance.

Put simply, Political Islam, whatever its various manifestations,
collapses the distinction between religion and politics, holding that
politics must be subordinated to a fundamentalist understanding of
Islam. And it is animated by a death cult–an explicit glorification of
mass murder and of dying for Allah–exceeding that of any major, modern
political movement or regime save Nazism and perhaps Imperial Japan.
Both genocidal slaughter (as practiced or merely called for) and
totalitarian tendencies define the Political Islamic Sudanese regime
(which Bergen and Lind treat, despite its several genocidal onslaughts,
as having “not given birth ” to a radical ideology”), the Taliban, al
Qaeda, the Iranian leadership, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim
Brotherhood, and various lesser-known Political Islamic movements.
Terrorism is but one important and powerful tool in the Political
Islamists’ arsenal.

Related to this is a fifth problem, namely that Bergen and Lind
treat Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda as stand-ins for terrorists in
general. This is misleading, as other terrorists and other Political
Islamic regimes have differing aspects and qualities. Bergen and Lind
make no mention, for example, of Iran, with its financing of and
support for the terrorists of Hezbollah and Hamas; its insistent drive
to acquire nuclear weapons; its expressed desire to annihilate Israel;
and its repeated threats to terrorize the Europeans should they not
kow-tow to its demands. The Iranian regime, in power for 27 years and
governing a wealthy, oil-rich country of almost 70 million people,
hardly suffers from humiliation. And so while their goals and
ideologies may be similar (despite their Sunni-Shia antipathies), Iran
cannot be understood by subsuming it into an analysis of a loosely
coordinated, deadly network of a few thousand terrorists.

As one deepens and broadens the understanding of these themes, the
picture of the conflicts becomes more complex and more intractable, the
policy prescriptions change, and the time horizons for dealing with the
problems lengthen. If indeed we are in conflict against Political
Islam, as I and many others believe, then we must look beyond
humiliation as a source of real solutions.

Of course, many actions of the West–the war in Iraq, the Israelis’
ongoing conflict with the Palestinians–fuel the Political Islamic
movements because they, their followers, and those Muslims vulnerable
to their appeals perceive any slight, let alone subjective setback for
Islam at the hands of the West, as humiliation. But this is not
humiliation as Bergen and Lind describe it. The relatively tame Danish
political cartoons that ran in 2005 unleashed a torrent of protests
among Political Islamists on three continents, threats of mass murder,
and actual violence and killings. What does this reaction have to do
with any reasonable sense of humiliation? Pope Benedict XVI’s strange
attempt at comparative religious enlightenment last September (in which
he quoted a fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor’s deprecating
statement about Islam) was greeted by some leading Political Islamists
in different countries with calls to “hunt down,” kill, or imprison the
pontiff. What does such an outlandish response to a few words have to
do with any reasonable sense of humiliation? When else in modern
history have significant religious and political leaders called for the
Pope to be killed? And all because of a few objectionable words?

To be sure, we could adopt measures, along the lines that Bergen and
Lind propose, to reduce conflict points and thereby undercut some of
the Political Islamists’ appeal. But would such steps really be
effective in the long-term? Closing our bases and ending our “perceived
occupation of the sacred territory of Saudi Arabia,” which supposedly
inflamed the Political Islamists against us, did little to end
Political Islamic terrorism and their imperial and totalitarian
desires, plans, and existing policies. Moreover, much Political Islamic
violence and terrorism (as Bergen and Lind note in passing) is directed
at other Muslims who have more pluralistic, nontotalitarian, or merely
different Political Islamist understandings of Islam. Humiliation is
not the issue. An all-consuming, divinely ordained desire to impose
theocratic totalitarian control is.

Moreover, it is not clear that we can put the humiliation “genie”
back in the bottle. Whatever role it played in the emergence of
Political Islam, that ideology now powerfully exists and has a vibrant
life of its own, controlling countries and threatening to take over
others. To return to the example of Nazi Germany, whatever the multiple
causes of Nazism’s rise, by 1938 it was not within the Allies’ power to
pacify the Nazis and the majority of Germans who supported them merely
by reducing further “humiliation”; by that time, the humiliating terms
of Versailles had been reversed and Germany had already regained its
status as a great power. To be sure, Bergen and Lind acknowledge that
by 1938 “no concessions ” short of acquiescence” would have sufficed.
But they do not draw the policy conclusion that follows for today. We
must recognize that likewise “no concessions ” short of acquiescence”
will satisfy the Political Islamists. We must therefore fashion
policies with a clear-eyed view of the underlying political-religious
ideology that structures their enmity and aspirations, the varied and
widespread political manifestations their movements and governments
assume, and the broad and determined threat they pose to governments
and peoples that goes well beyond al Qaeda’s by-now-classical terrorist
means.

Abandoning the Middle East to the Political Islamists and having
Israel capitulate (and ultimately surrender its existence) is the only
thing that will satisfy them–the only thing that will stop Political
Islamists, in Bergen and Lind’s language, from feeling “humiliated”
(and then only partly, given the growing number of Muslims in Europe).
Needless to say, this would be extremely self-injurious, not to mention
immoral. Instead, we should recognize the broad-based danger not merely
of terrorism, but of Political Islam. And we must realize that it can
only be defeated by active diplomatic, economic, and military
containment and, when practical, rollback by the United States and its
allies in Europe and in the Middle East. We should stop fixating on al
Qaeda and terrorism, narrowly construed, as the overwhelming problem
and recognize that the biggest danger is the Political Islamic colossus
and aspiring hegemon: the soon-to-go-nuclear Iran.

I’ve been trying to make my way through the tangle of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s response to Peter Bergen and Michael Lind, but his muddled, unsupported rant has defeated my comprehension.

Goldhagen claims to address the Bergen/Lind “humiliation thesis,” but immediatelyóin his first two sentencesóconflates humiliation with poverty. Never mind that Bergen and Lind don’t equate the two or claim a causal relationship between them (although they do acknowledge that poverty can make humiliation thrive). In fact, in their discussion of Nazism they expressly deny a connection between German poverty during the Great Depression and the German sense of humiliation; they also take care to point out that “recent research [demonstrates] that terrorism is a largely bourgeois endeavor” and that “many terrorists come from middle-class or wealthy backgrounds.”

Goldhagen goes on: “[E]ven assuming that Bergen and Lind are correct, they still fail to explain what exactly humiliation is–because, far from being an objective characteristic, as they seem to propose [my emphasis], it is a subjective quality that manifests itself in different quantities and intensities in different places, even in response to similar stimuli.” Bergen and Lind, of course, propose nothing of the kind: they make clear at every turn that humiliation is a subjective response to an historical situation.

Mysteriously, Goldhagen argues that “In [Bergen and Lind’s] analysis, ideologies are principally an outgrowth of humiliation,” something the authors simply never claim. He also claims that the Bergen/Lind analysis “treats terrorism as a foundational problem and policy issue,” but he doesn’t bother to define what he means by “foundational,” an adjective he reserves for what he calls “Political Islam,” evidently a catch-all term for “foundational political-religious worldviews, grounded ... in extremely widespread (though by no means universal) interpretations of Islam.”

Here is the real nub of Goldhagen’s ire. If terrorism is seen as a “foundational” problem, it clearly must be dealt with as a violent extremism that is not specific to Islam, but related instead to the subjective sense of humiliation that springs from a variety of ideologies and historical situations.

Seeing terrorism this way might encourage us to identify sources of humiliation and attempt to address them, even if it means changing our own modus operandi. What if the United States did not maintain more than 700 military bases in about 130 countries? What if access to clean water were declared a human right instead of a privilege accorded to those who can afford to pay for privatized water systems? What if the Israeli government chose to tear down its “protective” wall and withdraw from the occupied territories? What if the richest nations stopped propping up proxy autocracies around the world? According to Goldhagen, such changes in behavior would only embolden “Political Islam,” that is, those “Others” who seek to “sit on the throne of the world,” that is, the throne which is already occupied (thank you very much) by the inheritors of the old Western empires.

That would be a kind of humiliation Goldhagen simply could not stand.

Mar 13, 2007, 6:31 PM

chainlink:

I don't find the argument "tangled." The basic point, which seems correct to me, is that humiliation isn't a passkey to understanding and solving Islamic terrorism. It may be a syndrome, but can't its sufficient cause. This has to be sought in the ideology of Political Islam.

The reason why humiliation can't be an adequate explanation of terrorism is that any particular instance of experienced humiliation itself requires an explanation--humiliation isn't simply a biological fact, but an interpretation of experience. Clearly, then, the interpretive framework at hand to apply to experience is more fundamental than any specific instance of experienced humiliation. (For example, how much of the humiliated identity is group-based, how much an individual matter? What form of deference is expected that, when not forthcoming, provokes humiliation?)

Presumably, the alternative to humiliation that we who wish to stem Islamic terrorism would like to spread in Islamic lands (since we can hardly desire to plant triumphal satisfaction there by, say, our abject surrender to Islam as such) would be something like " their recognition of our due respect."

Okay, so what constitutes "due respect" to Islamists? Do they have any republican traditions that make of due respect something that can be shared equally among those of different religions and sexes? This we could offer them and remain who we are, but clearly it wouldn't count for them so long as they remain who they are.

So can Western unbelievers possibly offer anything to Islamists that, given their interpretive criteria, would count as a humiliation-averting due respect other than our submission, that is, our acknowledgment of the legal dominance of Islam? I don't see what. If they feel, as they do, that they are divinely entitled to this form of respect, it really doesn't take much to humiliate them.

What about to Muslims generally, the unislamist, or the not-yet Islamists--what could we offer them that would be a more potent satisfaction than the satisfaction Islamists offer them of extracting respect in the form of righteous submission? If we had tickets to prosperity for them, that might be distraction enough for many. But we don't.

So focusing our efforts on alleviating Muslim humiliation in the hope of combatting Islamist terrorism seems unlikely to bear much fruit.

Mar 15, 2007, 11:13 PM

A Questioner:

Perhaps Messrs. Bergen, Lind and Goldhagen all suffer from that American philosophical disease known as reductionism. American scholars seem to believe that complex causes can be reduced to either a single one or to some kind of good-evil dualism. Perhaps these scholars believe that if they can reduce complex issues to a single cause, they can eliminate it. I'm afraid that they are engaging in wishful thinking and that constructing a policy to deal with complexity must be characterized by the same.

May 6, 2007, 5:09 PM

Hal -Modern Man:

What concers me is the attitude, inherently subj -

ject, that you have been humiliated and thus gives you the license to react in any you choose. I see a connection here, however indirect, in the assertion

of the rapist that he rather than the "rapee" is the

victim because her behavior or dress was respon-

sible, not he, for his assault, however heinous.

Jul 24, 2007, 5:57 PM

Hal- Modern Man:

The above should be read as "inherently subjec-

tive"

Jul 24, 2007, 6:25 PM

Michael Messenger:

It is very simple, terrorist have hijacked a religion, Christianity.

Now they are deceiving the world with a "master of intrigue"(Daniel 8:24-25)as their head, calling themselves "Christians" while they violate the ten commandments of G-d and destroy the angelic family of Christ and for a fricking pretense, make long prayers and sing Christian songs on stage to make it appear as if they are a huge righteous group of non-doughnut eating holy of holies.

Does Prince William next in line to the throne as King of England frighten anyone else who is a true believer in monotheism and Christ?

I do not want to go through another 7 years of this horsefodder.

Psalm 91

Jan 21, 2012, 11:58 AM

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